From the Plate to Gastro-Politics

This book provides an interdisciplinary examination of Peruvian cuisine’s shift from a culinary to a political object and the making of Peru as a food nation on the global stage. It focuses on the contexts, processes and protagonists that have endowed the country’s cuisine with new meaning, new coherence and prominence, and with the ability to communicate what was important for Peruvians after decades of political violence and economic decline. This work unfolds central processes of the culinary project ranging from the emergence of gastronomy, to the refiguring of indigenous people as producers, to the use of cultural identity as an authenticating force. From the Plate to Gastro-Politics offers a critical reading of what has been called a “gastronomic revolution”, highlighting the ways in which claims to national unity and social reconciliation smooth over ongoing inequalities.

This book will be of interest to scholars and students of food studies, cultural anthropology, heritage studies and Latin American studies.

Peru has been applauded as an example of successful gastro-diplomacy and a model that other countries around could follow to turn their food traditions and their culinary creativity into engines of social and economic development. In this well-researched and thoughtful volume, Matta examines the meteoric ascent of Peruvian cuisine and its growing international visibility, showing what actually worked and what didn’t in a process that so far has not been sufficiently questioned. Using gastro-politics as his analytical lens, Matta explores the role of celebrity chefs, the new interest in local products from the Andes and the Amazon, and the institutional efforts to put Peru on the cosmopolitan foodies’ map. Matta’s research constitutes a welcome contribution to the global debates about food and its complex functions in nation-building projects.

 -Fabio Parasecoli, New York University

 Raúl Matta’s book, From the Plate to Gastro-Politics, is a timely contribution to our understanding of complex phenomena such as the part played by food in the production and reproduction of national identities and senses of belonging. Through his anthropological descriptions and analysis, Matta shows how cooking, food, and gastronomic consumption are often turned into catalysts of cultural identities that, at the same time, may conceal structural inequalities and silence subordinate voices. It constitutes a brilliant analysis of how chefs contributed to sha** the association between gastronomy and national identity, offering a critical but nuanced and balanced description of the emergence of Peruvian gastronomy and the part played in it by chefs, food producers and media. This book is a must read for scholars and readers at large interested in the socio-cultural understanding of how gastronomies have the power to mobilize national identities. 

-Steffan Igor Ayora-Diaz, Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán

Through a compelling and thoughtful narrative Raul Matta takes us on a revealing journey into the subjectivities, agencies, practices, narratives, and institutional frameworks that have shaped the recent gastronomic boom in Peru. In doing so he accounts for the complex and multidimensional interweaving of gastronomy, nationalism, capitalism and food heritage as arenas in which gastro-politics and indigenous foodways serve processes of reproduction and contestation of old and new class and ethnic inequalities. As a Peruvian himself, Matta masterfully succeeds to weave together reflexivity and critical thinking regarding a phenomenon that has captured national imagination and the aspirations of progress of Peruvians from different social and ethnic backgrounds, who celebrate it as a way out of a history of domination, violence and poverty. Shifting between familiarity and astonishment, using an interdisciplinary approach and capturing the multiple voices and performativities contained in testimonies, officialdocuments, publications, audio-visual materials and his own observation in the field, Matta unveils in a sensitive and rigorous way the contradictions that the gastronomic boom entail, pondering its transformative power.  

-Gisela Cánepa K, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú

Raúl Matta is research associate at the Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (UMR 208 PALOC), France. His research sits at the intersection of the anthropology of food, heritage and cultural studies, and the environmental humanities.